Integrated Motion Control of Interaction Safety, Stability, and Path-Tracking for Front-and-Rear-Independent-Drive Electric Vehicle

Under two vehicle interaction scenarios, the uncertain motion states of traffic participants pose significant challenges to the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs), and AVs are susceptible to instability with emergency avoidance constraints. To address this issue, an integrated motion control of interaction safety, stability, and path-tracking is proposed for front-and-rear-independent-drive electric vehicles (FRIDEV). First, a control-oriented longitudinal-lateral coupled dynamic model is established. Then, a variable step model predictive control (MPC) is designed to solve multiobjective optimization problems, which mainly include two parts: 1) adaptive adjustment of stability weight by an improved phase plane method and 2) adding an interactive safety constraint to motion control by backward reachability analysis. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed controller can effectively utilize the longitudinal and lateral tire forces and achieve a balance between stability and tracking accuracy, and reduce collision risk in the interactive scenario with milder control actions. Moreover, the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test demonstrates that the proposed controller is effective in the real-time environment.